Just some things I've noticed

Things I’ve noticed lately that remind me I am not working where I have ever worked before:

1. How does a country exist without binder clips? We looked at the stationary stores when we first moved here, and I looked in the supply shelves at my office. They just don’t exist. I am highly dependent on binder clips. I think they are a lovely invention, and I don’t know why they haven’t jumped the pond. What I did find on our office shelves is in this photo. I giggle every time I look at it.

Welcome to the Land of UK paper clips... note the comparison to a traditional US paper clip on the right, not the best picture but you still get the idea.








2. My brain insists on being surprised every time the man who sits next to me answers his phone with an English accent. I’m in England, for goodness sake. How many weeks before this doesn’t catch me off guard?
Read the rest...


3. I have been here for 3.5 weeks now, and I still haven’t been shown how to do my timesheets. I do, however, know where the fire exits are, where to gather outside if there is a fire, and that I definitely need to sign myself out if I leave so they know I’m not here. Why? In case there’s a fire, of course.
4. A coworker asked me what Michigan was like, and the conversation eventually turned to a discussion of the American and Canadian plain states. I explained that flat Nebraska was the most tedious part of the 24-hour drive my family used to make to ski in Colorado. This innocent comment was greeted with an awed, “But it only takes 14 hours to drive to Italy from here!” Man, we are going to Italy.
5. My first week, I completely forgot three times that my work week ends at 12:30pm on Fridays. I even rescheduled something and asked Josh to run an errand for me because it had to be done during business hours. Then suddenly I would realize that, wait, I don’t have to do anything that afternoon! I would be home before dark! And each time I remembered, even if it was just randomly at my desk on a Wednesday afternoon, I would get this little thrill and grin involuntarily…
6. My office has the thickest 3-ply toiletr paper I’ve ever felt. Doesn’t that just seem like an extravagant waste of money?
7. I get paid monthly. Really? Every FOUR weeks?
8. While we are on the topic, I am told by our accountant that 20% of my pay check goes towards taxes. Another 10% goes to National Insurance. And I thought the healthcare was free here.
9. This is not work-related, but seems to go with the previous item. Some friends here told us that you can get aspirin with codeine over the counter. Yet if you are at hospital in great pain you get administered morphine. Morphine! Codeine to morphine seems like a big jump until you think of the assumptions we make about the way things should be based on our own experiences. Codeine and morphine have been around so long that the National Health System doesn’t have to pay any drug companies a proprietary fee. The NHS is cheap, as it well should be. So all those pain medications we Americans are so familiar with from sitcom jokes or our own experience are partly made possible by the way our country handles its health problems. How interesting.
10. Finally, I get paid about the same amount as I got paid in the United States. I don’t quite understand this. As far as I can tell, salaries are roughly in line with each other. That makes sense until you look at the prices of just about every thing around here. Food, clothing, toiletries… most of these goods are roughly twice the cost of equivalent items in America, so how can one get by on the same salary? Part of this may be my comparable American salary was from New York City, where I imagine it was a bit higher than it would be in the Midwest. But not by enough. The only thing Josh and I can think of is health care. Could the amount that Americans spend in healthcare make up that difference? It seems a stretch…